Previously unknown human brain region identified

It turns out we humans may have an extra type of thinky bit that isn’t found in other primates. A previously unknown brain structure was identified while scientists carefully imaged parts of the human brain for an upcoming atlas on brain anatomy.

Neuroscientist George Paxinos and his team at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have named their discovery the endorestiform nucleus – because it is located within (endo) the inferior cerebellar peduncle (also called the restiform body). It’s found at the base of the brain, near where the brain meets the spinal cord.

Boy loses large hunk of brain. And is “doing just fine.” When pundits talk glibly of creating artificial minds or claim that consciousness is an illusion, it might help to remember that few people predicted that cases like this could exist and few thought that high tech diagnostics would lead to their discovery.

3 Responses to Previously unknown human brain region identified

“They’re made out of meat.”“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.”“Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?”“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”“No brain?”
“Oh, there is a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!”“So… what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.”“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?”“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
“Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”“So what does the meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual.”“We’re supposed to talk to meat?”
“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?’ That sort of thing.”“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”“I thought you just told me they used radio.”
“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”
“Officially or unofficially?”“Both.”
“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi-beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”“I was hoping you would say that.”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say?” `Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”
“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the universe.”
“That’s it.”
“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”
“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”
“And we can mark this sector unoccupied.”“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”
“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”“They always come around.”
“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone.”

If anything ever gave evidence that God is behind the Design we see in biology, it is the human brain:

The Human Brain Is ‘Beyond Belief’ by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * – 2017
Excerpt: The human brain,, is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”1 and “a world we had never imagined.”2,,,
Perfect Optimization
The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.,,,
Vast Computational Power
Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both memory-storage and information-processing features.,,, Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. To put this in perspective, one of the researchers revealed that the study’s results showed a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on Earth.1,,,
Phenomenal Processing Speed
the processing speed of the brain had been greatly underrated. In a new research study, scientists found the brain is 10 times more active than previously believed.6,7,,,
The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed.,,,
Petabyte-Level Memory Capacity
Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.9,,,
Optimal Energy Efficiency
Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function.11 ,,,
Multidimensional Processing
It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.13
He also said:
We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.13,,,
Biophoton Brain Communication
Neurons contain many light-sensitive molecules such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Even the mitochondria machines that produce energy inside cells contain several different light-responsive molecules called chromophores. This research suggests that light channeled by filamentous cellular structures called microtubules plays an important role in helping to coordinate activities in different regions of the brain.,,,https://www.icr.org/article/10186

“Complexity Brake” Defies Evolution – August 8, 2012
Excerpt: Consider a neuronal synapse — the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse — about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years…, even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year.http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....62961.html

Evidence that the human brain was created holistically instead of piecemeal is found by the fact that “An ancient part of the brain long ignored by the scientific world appears to play a critical role in everything from language and emotions to daily planning.
It’s the cerebellum, which is found in fish and lizards as well as people.
But in the human brain, this structure is wired to areas involved in higher-order thinking”

The Underestimated Cerebellum Gains New Respect From Brain Scientists – Oct. 25, 2018
Excerpt: An ancient part of the brain long ignored by the scientific world appears to play a critical role in everything from language and emotions to daily planning.
It’s the cerebellum, which is found in fish and lizards as well as people.
But in the human brain, this structure is wired to areas involved in higher-order thinking, a team led by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis reports Thursday in the journal Neuron.
“We think that the cerebellum is acting as the brain’s ultimate quality control unit,” says Scott Marek, a postdoctoral research scholar and the study’s first author.
The finding adds to the growing evidence that the cerebellum “isn’t only involved in sensory-motor function, it’s involved in everything we do,” says Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann, a neurology professor at Harvard and director of the ataxia unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.,,,https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/25/660504533/the-underestimated-cerebellum-gains-new-respect-from-brain-scientists

This, as well as many other evidences, refute the supposed “lizard brain” hypothesis (if such a absurd notion even deserves to be called a hypothesis),

YOU DON’T HAVE A LIZARD BRAIN – Daniel Toker – April 2018
Excerpt: Over the last few decades, MacLean’s theory has become part of the cultural zeitgeist. Clickbait articles bashing the “basic ‘lizard brain’ psychology” of an opponent political group appear on mainstream news websites. Articles with headlines like “Your Lizard Brain” and “Don’t Listen to Your Lizard Brain” get featured on Psychology Today, a magazine whose sales have soared to the top 10 in the nation. The triune brain theory has even been featured prominently in a blog article on Scientific American, an award-winning and massively popular science magazine. Except perhaps for the political clickbait, these are all publications that make an honest and serious attempt to get the scientific facts right. And this popularity can’t just be pinned on major media: I’ve seen the triune brain theory pop up in college psychology textbooks (e.g this one, this one, and this one), and a search for #triunebrain on Twitter yields a litany of casual references to the idea that we have a lizard brain.
But MacLean’s triune brain theory is completely wrong – and neuroscientists have known it’s wrong for decades.
The theory is wrong for a simple reason: our brains aren’t fundamentally different from those of reptiles, or even from those of fish.https://danieltoker.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-lizard-brain/

Related note:

The Human Brain Is Something New – Ann Gauger – September 18, 2018
Excerpt: Physically a human brain is three times the size of a chimpanzee brain, and uses considerably more energy. Our brain represents 2 percent of our body weight but uses 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe. However, our brains are not merely enlarged ape brains — there are other differences. Our brains contain neural structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal.1 Our neurons continue dividing well into adulthood and have a 10-fold higher density than chimps. The human brain is something new, something different, as can be seen by the things we do that animals don’t.,,,
David Premack, the late psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania said:
“In examining claims of similarity between animals and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining eight cognitive cases — teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language — and find, in all cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small, dissimilarities large.2”
Our brains have vastly more ability than is needed for survival, most notably the capacity for language and abstract thought. We are orders of magnitude beyond anything animals can do.https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/beyond-adapation-the-human-brain-is-something-new/